How does this help me?
When running on BlueStacks, games using ASTC texture compression can have the visual experience rendered directly by modern GPUs. This enhances gameplay experience significantly by improving the overall responsiveness and performance for playing the game.
BlueStacks typically chooses hardware or software decoding automatically, however, these controls are being exposed to give you direct control over the visual experience
How can I select ASTC Texture options?
Users of BlueStacks version 4.160.10.2058 and above can follow the steps below to change ASTC texture settings. As always, we highly recommend you to update to the latest version of BlueStacks.
Steps
1) Open BlueStacks preferences from the menu bar.
2) A new window will then appear. Now click on 'Engine'. By default, it is 'Disabled'.
3) Changes are saved automatically.
In 3D graphics, the texture is a digital representation for the surface of an object, e.g., a hero, or their weapon, or leaves on trees and grass in the surrounding scenery. Well-defined textures are very important for rendering realistic 3-D images. However, they also require a lot of memory. The Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC) technology is used by games to provide a realistic, high-resolution, 3D visual experience while reducing image data size, memory footprint, and loading time, to enhance the game performance.
In software decoding, the CPU performs all the high-resolution texture decoding to compose and render the image. Enabling 'caching' will take some disk space but will improve the read/write operations from the CPU’s memory, improving the response time.
If you feel that the software decoding is introducing a lag during your gameplay you may disable ASTC textures, in which case you may not see some of the objects rendered correctly.
Software decoding:
With software decoding, the CPU performs all the high-resolution texture decompression to compose and render the image. Enabling 'caching' will take some disk space but will improve the read/write operations from the CPU’s memory, improving the response time.
Thank you for choosing BlueStacks. We hope you enjoy using it. If you have any further questions, please contact us at support@bluestacks.com. Happy Gaming!
Last updated on March 06, 2020.